26 October 2020 - What's new
26 October 2020
- ‘You write a biography from the vantage point of where you are: your gender, your race, your class. It's not a love affair or a marriage: it's a job. You're not writing autobiography; you're writing about some other person, usually a dead person. You can only access them in as far as you have materials and witnesses to allow you to access them. You are at the mercy of what you can find and read and hear and see. You become as intimate as you can with the life and work of this person... But there is always going to be a gap... Hermione Lee, author of many books including biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and now Tom Stoppard, her only living subject, in the New Statesman.
- Written exclusively for WritersServices - Trident Media Group Literary Agent Mark Gottlieb explains how literary agencies work. It's no surprise that they do a lot more than you think and that they bring a lot of expertise in a range of different areas to bear on behalf of their authors. How Literary Agents Work.
- Last year we launched the Writer's edit, a top-level new service for writers who want line-editing as well as copy editing. Does your manuscript need high-level input from an editor to help you get it into the best possible shape for submission or self-publishing? This may be the service for you, offering the kind of editing which publishers' senior editors used to do in-house on their authors' manuscripts and which is now hard to find. Our other copy editing services.
- Our links on writing: there's only one question to ask an author, Hilary Mantel on How Writers Learn to Trust Themselves | Literary Hub; terrible Hollywood adaptations, writing LGBTQ characters for YA and much more, Rick Riordan: 'I feel very protective of my fans. I am aware of my responsibility to make them feel safe' | Books | The Guardian; Why would you want to write a book this way? Why would you want to expose the early stages of your work to the World Wide Web? 10 Reasons Why You Should Blog a Book - How to Blog a Book; at last they're starting to get attention, Graphic novels are overlooked by book prizes, but that's starting to change; Can reading aloud help you write better? Does planning too far ahead overcomplicate things? Five writing tips for beginners - National Centre for Writing; and a leader who blazed a trail, Margaret Busby: how Britain's first black female publisher revolutionised literature - and never gave up | Society | The Guardian.
- Writers' stories - they're just a bit of fun, but in a rare moment of inspiration we wrote some fictionalised stories of how the services could turn out, to give you a better idea of how they might work for you. Joe's fantasy novel benefited from some professional input, when he signed up for an Editor's Report Plus. Tony needed Copy editing to get his manuscript into shape for publication or self-publishing.
- More links on writers and books: writing a book about my adventure? I Spent Nearly Two Decades Writing and Editing My Book. It Finally Found a Publisher. | Jane Friedman; transformed by a great writer into The Greengage Summer, My search for novelist Rumer Godden's famed French summer - BBC News; good news from his Nigerian publisher, Wole Soyinka to publish first novel in almost 50 years | Books | The Guardian; as usual, it's a crazy shortlist, The Bookseller announces the Diagram Prize 2020 shortlist | The Bookseller; and how Book Aid InternationalSupplies much-needed books to developing countries, raising funds from publishers and general public; 'Reverse Book Club' is masterly idea-for just £5 ($10) month you can provide 48 books to go to where they're most needed has been keeping young people supplied with books during the Covid-19 crisis, Pandemic: maintaining the books lifeline.
- Getting your poetry published - Poets are naturally keen to see their work in print but it's actually quite hard to get a first collection taken on by a publisher. This is because most poetry lists are pretty small... It's hard to achieve any sales for first collections and the publishers have to be realistic about this. Here's how to look at the options.
- 'After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes, is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.' Gertrude Stein in our Writers' Quotes.